The Evil In Us (2016)

The prologue to The Evil In Us reveals a modern apartment turned blood-soaked charnel house where police find two of the three room mates dead, and the third (Tatyana Forrest) alive but horrifically mutilated. There appears to have been no murder weapon.

As, over the next 24 hours, Detective Jake Strudwick (John Gillich) races to work out what happened to these flatmates, six similarly aged, similarly affluent liberals go holidaying on a small island together to celebrate the 4th of July. Brie (Debs Howard) is the new girlfriend of Steve (Danny Zaporozan), and the only outsider in a tight group of friends who come with complicated emotional histories and tensions. Those complications will become exacerbated to deadly extremes when the cocaine brought over by Wheeler (Ian Collins) begins to have unusual side-effects on all who use it – and Brie will find herself having to face a monstrous evil in the very people who just hours ago had embraced her as family. Meanwhile, in a laboratory, a sinister man (Robert Leaf) oversees strange experiments on prisoners.

Writer/director Jason William Lee offers viewers all the thrills of a zombie/’rage’ virus film, while placing those thrills in a very different kind of narrative frame and idoleogical context. It boasts the drug-induced murder-mania of Paddy Breathnach’s Shrooms (2007), Ian Clark’s The Facility (2012) or Alberto Marini’s Summer Camp (2015), and its path to horror is paved with well-sketched, believable characters – but Lee uses his island setting as a laboratory for bigger ideas about how unscrupulous opportunists can set society upon itself for their own ends.

It may at first seem odd to have a Canadian film set in and around Seattle, Washington during that most American of holidays Independence Day, but this is because Lee’s feature debut is a comment on the vulnerabilities of the political system in place south of Canada’s border – a system where people are easily polarised against one another by those who use fear-mongering to cling, or accede, to power. The Evil In Us, you see,is also The Evil In US – and while it may begin with all the tropes of genre in place (the bickering co-eds; the isolated cabin in the woods; the sex, drinking and drugs; the zombie-like behaviour; the violence, brutality and cannibalism), it ends somewhere closer to a prediction of how easily a ruthless demagogue can use homegrown terror to manipulate a rise to the highest office – ensuring the film’s own relevance to some very contemporary anxieties. In the Age of Trump, that is enough to make all of us insanely paranoid.

Post navigation

3 thoughts on “The Evil In Us (2016)”

More like “in the age of Obama and Hillary”. It’s unlikely Trump commands a cadre of computer hackers, but we know that Hillary spent a lot of time deleting her influence-peddling emails and then hiding it. And we know that Obama used the IRS to attack the Republicans, then had the emails deleted and allowed Lerner to escape unscathed. And we know Obama manipulated the FBI into letting Hillary escape prosecution for her criminal email deletion, while also granting immunity to her top aides… and the list goes on.

Haha, who knows what sort of secret laboratory Trump has in his Tower. Although, seriously, Trump does have “a cadre of [Russian] computer hackers” at his command, and has – publicly – called on them to do his dirty work.

We filmed this movie in the summer of 2014, well before Trump’s rise to power. But the similarities of our film to current events are hard to ignore… except for some Trump voters who saw Obama as evil incarnate… but comparing Obama to our villain is a much harder stretch IMO. Regardless, it’s great to see that some viewers, including Anton, feel the message in our film is relevant. I’m certain that Trump will exploit any US terror attack to serve his own agenda and those who pull his strings (defense contractors, Russia, etc).